


The Spookiest Story

by Yeah_JSmith



Category: Anchorhead - Fandom, Zootopia (2016)
Genre: Age Reversal, Alternate Universe - Different Roles, Comedy, Demons, F/M, Genre Savvy Nick Wilde, Happy belated Halloween, Judy is a Terrible Demon, Nightmare Fetish, PI Judy, References to Legitimate Horror, Street Hustler Nick, This is rated M for murder not explicit things, Weird Cuts, Zombies, as in she's terrible at it, shady deals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-12
Packaged: 2019-08-19 15:49:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16537565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yeah_JSmith/pseuds/Yeah_JSmith
Summary: Full-time hustler and part-time sidekick Nick Wilde gets tangled up in some weird demon shenanigans when the PI he kinda sorta definitely has more than a crush on collapses on his couch.





	1. Goo for You

**Author's Note:**

> Take a gander at the _phenomenal_ I.F. horror game [Anchorhead](http://pr-if.org/play/anchorhead/) if you want to get all the references in this, but if you're old enough to have played it, don't expect the seriousness. I mostly used names rather than lore, and you don't need to have played it to get the story.
> 
> Those of you who want story without having to spend a couple of hours playing the game: it's largely inspired by the works of Lovecraft, and the protagonist and her husband Go Through Some Shit.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Spooky Story, the Playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFsMzmYsLKfNS36QkUTJSHFHomqrNWqnd)

The day everything changed, Nick Wilde was playing Fight Fight Panic with his neighbor, Judy Hopps. It was kinda weird, since she wasn’t actually in the room, but the walls were thin enough that she could be the  _ worst  _ backseat driver without even looking at the screen. In a Very Annoyed Tone, Nick snapped, “Well, if you’re so good at this game, come over and show me how it’s done, Carrots!”

“Don’t call me Carrots,” she snapped back, but she headed over anyway.

Nick tried to hide his grin.

Judy was a PI, and a damn good one. After being rejected from the police academy  _ three times  _ due to species bias, she had decided that there was more than one way to skin a lizard, and apprenticed under an ocelot whose disdain for convention had worked in Judy’s favor. Katrina “Kat” Castleberry was still around, but after the case of a missing florist had ended in the uncovering of a government conspiracy and bio terrorism, she’d retired, passing her client and contact list to the only apprentice who’d managed to stick with it through her harsh teaching methods and capricious behavior. Even with the case of the century under her belt, Judy Hopps wasn’t exactly a household name, but her business was the fourth one on the first Zoogle search page  _ without _ the magic of SEO, and that was no small feat.

Nick was allowed to help on her cases, sometimes. He’d signed an NDA and everything. It wasn’t anything special, just talking to potential clients if she was out and taking film to get developed, but that was how he knew she was probably the coolest bunny  _ ever. _

In a world where things made sense, Judy would have come over, played retro games for a couple of hours, and eaten pizza with him — like a date, except better, because there weren’t any scary expectations — but things didn’t make sense. As soon as she walked in on him, looking mighty scrubby in striped shorts and a plaid flannel monstrosity that was pretending to be a shirt, she opened her mouth to say something...and promptly keeled over. Nick was quick and nimble — a whole _eight years younger_ than her, as Judy _loved_ to remind him — so he managed to catch her before she hit the ground. As soon as he set her gently on the couch…

Well. That was when the world stopped making sense.

His super cool neighbor seized up, shaking. Even her eyes were shaking back and forth, her irises a blur of purple. Was he supposed to hold her down? Put a belt between her teeth? No, that was a myth, right? Was he supposed to turn her on her side? Her stomach?  _ What was he supposed to do!?  _ In the throes of such situational panic only seen in traditionalists faced with the prospect of social progress, Nick almost missed the part where Judy’s body started to  _ melt into his couch,  _ looking less and less like a rabbit and more and more like runny eggs, and  _ ew,  _ how was he going to clean that up? Or explain it? Oh, God, he was going to be charged with murder and, like, cruel and unusual punishment, and he would spend his life in  _ prison,  _ and even worse, the landlady was going to be  _ so pissed  _ that he’d gotten rabbit goo on her floor – and the Judy-liquid began to  _ glow,  _ and—

he dropped to his knees, his stomach heaving and expelling everything he’d ever eaten, like,  _ ever,  _ as a noise not unlike the unraveling of the entire infinite universe sounded in his ears

—and like pressing  _ rewind  _ on one of those old VHS machine things, Judy’s body decayed in reverse, unidentifiable goo turning into a lumpy mass turning into the outline of a body turning into an actual seizing body turning into a peaceful, quiet one.

He wanted to curl up and cry, but there was vomit on the floor and his super cool neighbor was on his couch and  _ what the ever-living fuck? _

Before he could even consider getting up to clean the godawful mess — this was like a train wreck, all of it, getting sick in front of the mammal he liked, and also  _ whatever the hell  _ had just happened — Judy’s eyes fluttered halfway open and, for some reason, muttered, “ ¿ Qué rayos?”

Nick’s entire nine months of sixth grade Spanish lessons flew through his head and immediately exited stage left. Panicked, he shouted the only full sentence he could remember. “ ¿ Dónde están mis pantalones?”

It was a good thing that Judy passed out again, because in the privacy of his own mind, Nick would never, ever live that down.

* * *

Nick did not, as a rule, consider himself maladjusted. He was usually pretty even-keeled, maybe not happy or even  _ content  _ with his lot in life, but no longer full of youthful rage. With his floor scrubbed as much as possible with vodka and baking soda, he could think a little better, and what he thought was this:

_ I, Nicholas Wilde, hallucinated that entire thing, because I am clearly not well. _

Judy was napping peacefully on one end of his couch and he was sitting on the other, pretending to read but really just hyper-aware of her feet, which were about an inch away from touching his thigh. If he touched them, she’d probably kick him in her sleep, and the fact that he’d weighed the pros and cons of getting kicked made him feel like a creep. And kind of a loser. Only gross mammals would touch someone while they were sleeping. Right? That was a thing, right? A hustler like Nick needed to be smooth and collected and socially competent, but it all flew out the window when she was involved. Ugh. Betrayed by hormones, what a  _ drag. _

He couldn’t wait until he got older. Not only would he probably spend much less time, uh, _fantasizing,_ but Judy would take him seriously. Or at least stop calling him Kit all the time.

He caught her sudden curl and stretch in his peripheral vision — his heart felt dangerously like a stuttering Kindergartener when the tips of her toes brushed his thigh — and he pretended not to notice when her eyes slowly opened. Oh  _ God,  _ those eyelashes. In a voice so thick with sleep it sounded like sex, she asked, “What happened?”

He opened his mouth. The intent was to say something calm, something cool, something vaguely worried but still clear that he was a mature, competent fox who could totally take care of any weird problem life threw at him. What actually came out was, “Well, Carrots, you died on my couch, but you came back to life, so I just let you sleep it off.”

Wow.

Smooth.

Fortunately, she laughed, believing it was a joke. His heart did that thing again when she sat up and stretched her arms above her head, one paw grabbing the other elbow and pulling the arm behind her head. She switched and he averted his eyes as she answered, “Thanks for letting me sleep, I guess. Jeez, I'm starving. I could eat a whole elephant.”

“That would be gross,” he said mildly, sort of put off by just  _ how  _ gross it was, “and also illegal.”

“Then I guess I'll have to settle for takeout.” She pulled out her phone. “Are noodles okay for you?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Inside, he was freaking out. Slightly. This was like a date, except not, because nobody had called it that, and her smile was radiant, but also she was just his neighbor and she called him Kit and it wasn't like they hadn't eaten together before, two lonely neighbors who shared a love of pizza and retro games, and he tried not to read too much into anything, but that was kind of who he was. He read too much into  _ everything.  _

Judy made a face at her phone, which seemed to be on silent, and pressed a button. “This is Hopps.”

Nick wasn't jealous of the male murmur on the end of the line, mostly because he would never be jealous of someone who made her look like she'd just smelled a rotting cadaver. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and answered the mammal on the line, “Ethan, I appreciate it. I  _ do.  _ But I told you — no, I'm not — you listen here, mister, I'm going to eat greasy questionable takeout with my good friend and laze around tonight, and you're going to stop calling me until I'm not mad at you anymore, are we clear? Good. Goodbye.”

She viciously jabbed the end button. Nick had the fleeting thought that smartphones were great until you needed the satisfaction of slamming the receiver into its cradle. Hesitantly, he asked, “Are you okay?”

“I'm fine. I just don't want to date Ethan Longfoot, and he's not getting the memo. Do you think I was too forceful?”

“Not if that wasn't the first time he pestered you,” his mouth replied easily, but his brain felt like all the lights were flashing red. Ethan Longfoot was the rabbit who played Jack Savage in the _Agent Savage_ Webflix series! He was perfect! Even Nick knew that! He was handsome, smooth, involved in charity and activism, and he was _filthy rich,_ so...what! How! Why was she planning to sit around with Nick Wilde in his shitty apartment eating bad takeout when she could be going out with Ethan Longfoot!? _ERROR. ERROR._

“He was nice when we met. He's a nice buck. It's just that I think he's used to aggressively going after what he wants, as a bunny in a field usually reserved for larger mammals, so he doesn't know yet that sometimes no isn't an invitation for further negotiations, it's  _ actually  _ a no.”

Never one to settle for being called smart when there was the option to be stupidly masochistic instead, Nick asked her, “Why don't you want him?”

She shrugged. “Personality conflicts, mostly. We're a lot alike, but our differences don't really mesh well. And I could never be with someone who doesn't challenge me intellectually.”

“He's not smart?”

_ “I don't know!  _ He always agrees with me even when I'm obviously full of it!” Judy sighed. “Anyway, let's just get noodles and see who kicks whose tail at  _ Fight Fight Panic.” _

* * *

Nick floated in a void. It was neither dark nor light; there was no sensation; there was no sound. He wasn’t sure if he was even breathing. All he knew for sure was that he couldn’t move a muscle.

As time stretched on like a Lion Tolstoy novel he couldn’t look away from, he became aware of something touching him, wrapping his wrists and ankles in painfully tight grips. It — whatever it was — pulled him, stretching his arms wider than they should be and holding his legs in place. His spine cracked pleasantly, a nice contrast to the agony in the rest of his joints. There was a whisper. A murmur. Some sound, not a hum or a buzz, but like millions of insects rubbing against each other, or maybe someone walking by with quiet electronica playing in their headphones, or what shadows might sound like if they weren’t silent.

And speaking of shadows…

The void faded, or maybe brightened, and as his eyes adjusted to the sudden present-ness of it, the sound got louder. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see something, something  _ growing,  _ and he turned to look but before he could a shape took form, growing from writhing shadows cast by nothing, and out of the cocoon stepped Judy Hopps.

Her smile set him on fire, but then…

Something was wrong. It was Judy, his neighbor, someone he’d known for two years, right down to the not-so-playful hip-pop stance she’d taken when chewing out Félinia’s parents. The carrot in her paw floated out of her grip and, glowing against the shadows, said, “200 bucks a  _ day,  _ Fluff. 365 days a year, since I was  _ twelve.”  _

That was his voice, but not. There was anger in it, the kind of anger Nick had cultivated until he was nineteen. It was aggressive. And, of course, he’d never said that. He paid his damn taxes! He’d paid them since he’d decided not to live under a bridge anymore!

“I reordered time for this  _ thing,”  _ Judy boomed, her voice like a bad children’s choir. He grimaced. “The owner of this body cannot fathom the power it holds. And it asked the power to help it-” Judy’s voice went high and mocking. “- _ make the world a better place. Make sure all the mammals I love are safe. _ You will help make it pay for its-”

“Uh,  _ no,”  _ Nick said, and yelped when the chains pulled tighter. “You’re my — or she’s my — we’re neighbors.”

Not-Judy made a growling noise that made Nick shudder and stepped forward. The body grew to three times its size and asked, “You would deny God?”

“Yes.”

Incredulity marched across Not-Judy’s face. “Why?”

“Because…” He paused. Frowned.  _ Why  _ was a good question. What did he owe Judy? She was just his neighbor, his friend, the one he sometimes helped out in return for dinner and company, just the bunny who listened to his problems and shared hers in return and ate takeout with him and oh  _ shit.  _ “I’m sort of in love with her.”

“Then you’ll — urk!”

The body before him twisted, shrank, made horrible shrieking noises. Nick’s ears went flat and turned back a little, and he tried to escape the chains, but they were too strong. Too tight. Not-Judy slowly got down to Judy’s usual height and blinked rapidly before croaking, “Oh, ow.”

“...Judy?”

She focused on him, the purple so much more intense than it should be. Her voice  _ resonated  _ with power when she asked, “Why are you chained up, Sweetheart?”

“There isn’t a reason,” he babbled, taking the  _ sweetheart  _ thing maybe just a  _ bit  _ too seriously because it really felt good, “because I just woke up like this and you were evil, but now you’re not.”

(Apparently, he wasn’t very cool when weird, inexplicable body contortions were involved.)

“I think I know what’s happening here,” she mused. Something made her seem more solid, more present. She looked him up and down appreciatively. “I’ve fantasized about seeing you like this before.” The step forward shouldn’t have brought her so close to him, but for some reason, it did. She reached out her paw, not touching him but still tracing his form, and it was  _ incredibly  _ erotic. “Touching you.”

“You can do that if you want,” he croaked, but what he meant was  _ please do that immediately. _

Her other paw came up, hovering over his lips, but she didn’t make contact. “Can I, though?”

_ “Yes.”  _ It was like he could feel her paw tracing down his chest and stomach, even though he couldn’t — she still wasn’t  _ touching  _ him — and the lack of pressure on his increasingly-interested penis was kind of painful the longer and longer she stood there sharing his intimate space — and she leaned forward, sucking in his air, but each time he wriggled or tried to get closer, she moved away just enough to maintain distance — and he whined like a dumb kit, much to his embarrassment. “Please — come on, Judy, touch me  _ please.” _

She bit her lip, her eyes fluttering. He bucked his hips a fraction, enough to make contact with her paw. Her eyes flew open again and she looked surprised, but she didn’t move away; instead, she pressed a little harder, a soft knuckle rubbing a tiny circle against the crotch of his pants. He was going to die for sure. To entice her further, he told her, “I’ll do whatever you want, just…”

“Anything?”

He should have been afraid of the sudden sparkle in her fur, or the way she seemed to be smaller than he and absolutely  _ giant  _ at the exact same time, or the blast of raw power, but most of that bypassed his brain entirely and shot straight to his groin, because of course it did. “Anything!”

“You and I,” she said, shadows rising up behind her and making her eyes glow eerily, “are going to have  _ so much fun.” _

Nick thrashed in his bonds, as desperate to escape the shadowy threat as he was to finally be  _ touched— _

—and woke up with a raging hard-on. 

So. 

Apparently, he was into that. 

With the frustrated sigh of a horny teen cleverly blocked by parental controls — or in his case, eight years and a greasy wall — Nick bared his teeth at the ceiling. He couldn’t even jerk off now, he’d feel weird, and what if Judy heard him? Oh, God...she  _ always  _ heard him, didn’t she? He didn’t think he ever said anything or did more than hold back his noises as best he could, but what if...was that why she called him Kit? Did she  _ know?  _ If he bit the bullet, would she get that  _ look  _ on her face and be all...nice and gentle when she turned him down? That would be so much worse than a slap in the face, knowing that she  _ cared.  _ Judy cared about everything.

He hadn’t meant for it to go like this. He was too young for her. He was a hustler by choice. They were different species! She was supposed to be his friend, someone he could nurture a nice unattainable crush on, someone who wouldn’t turn down  _ Jack Savage  _ just to eat takeout with her douchebag neighbor, and  _ oh.  _ Maybe  _ that  _ was why she called him Kit. Maybe she was wide awake on the other side of the wall, wrestling with the same issue. Maybe if he just relieved himself, allowing all the usually-suppressed grunts and moans to come out in full force, she would kick down the door and…

(He did. She didn’t. She also didn’t look him in the eye for two whole days.)


	2. Soul Theft for Dummies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nick and Judy deal with some problems that neither of them expected.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> People call fanfiction stories "fanfics" and I think that's cute.

The photos were delivered to Judy’s apartment-slash-office promptly at noon, because that was when he was supposed to deliver them. Nick liked to stay on schedule because it helped him know what was going on, know what was going to happen next, and plan the rest of his day. The only bad thing about working with Judy, even in this limited capacity, was her penchant for spontaneity; he was reasonably good at being put on the spot, but he liked having a plan better. Staying ahead of the game was always preferable to having to birdshit his way through an unexpected twist.

Judy knew that, and she also wasn’t crazy, which was why he thought she was joking when she randomly said, “Nick, I’m pretty sure I’m a demon.”

“Cool,” he said, rolling with it. Judy’s sense of humor was a usually a weird mixture of ego, self-deprecation, and good old-fashioned wholesomeness; even though he didn’t get it, at least she’d tried. “Then you can scare our landlady into dropping the rent.”

“I’m _serious.”_

He really looked at her, then. She hadn’t been able to meet his eyes since that night he’d — uh —  _let it all out,_ so to speak, but she was looking right at him from behind her tiny desk that had once been a sewing table. (It was nice, because after business hours she could wheel it out of the way and actually have an apartment.) Her ears were droopy, her nose was twitching overtime, and her foot was thumping, sure signs of anxiety. He felt his face do the thing faces did when someone felt bad about something. Sympathy? Empathy? Whatever, it was inconvenient, and it always happened around sad mammals. His usual go-to, bailing before anyone noticed, seemed too heartless to do to Judy, so he didn’t run away. Instead, like a total sucker, he asked, “Is this about Ethan Longfoot?”

“What,” she said flatly, confusion on her face. It cleared when she had a visible _a-ha_ moment. “Oh. You think I’m being metaphorical. No, I think I’m a literal demon.”

“You’re not a demon, Carrots. All your clients would say you’re a dream come true,” he told her, trying to cheer her up. Apparently, she felt really bad about herself, for...some reason.

“Yeah, the kind where your teeth all fall out and everything is spiders.”

He blinked at her. She blinked back at him. He found himself unable to look away, probably out of pride, but she was too pretty for that to be a real inconvenience anyway. After some time, in which Nick absolutely won the first staring contest he’d had since fifth grade, she sighed and gestured toward the door. “See for yourself.”

Nick turned, confused, and then shrieked like a five-year-old. On the door and the walls next to it was a writhing mass of spiders — black widows and brown recluses and weird yellow somethings and hobo spiders and whatever that giant blue one was — and before he could think about his reaction, or even process the sight, he’d leapt over the desk to sort of scrunch down behind Judy. She wasn’t a very good barrier, and anyway, _why was everything spiders?_

“I told you, I’m pretty sure I’m a demon,” she said calmly, as though spider-walls were a normal, everyday occurrence. He was halfway convinced the whole building needed to be burned down. “I would think maybe _witch,_ except the only things I can do are pretty destructive, and I can’t ride a broom.”

“So that clearly excludes the witch idea,” he said, hysterical laughter bubbling up in his chest. Oh, _God,_ Judy was nuts and everything was spiders. “Ha-ha, because witches have never in history been associated with spiders.”

“You don’t have to make fun of me. I can also, uh.” Her ears drooped again and her shoulders hunched, and Nick was sure if she’d been looking at him she would have looked away. It was bad, wasn’t it? It was terrible. She was going to tell him he was dying or something. “I can invade dreams. Which was unexpected. Um, did you know Dharma dreams about being scolded by an angry schoolteacher in a language she can’t understand? It’s actually Cantonese, which for some reason I also speak now, but _she_ can’t — Nick?”

“That wall is crawling with spiders,” he whimpered. Because it was true, and also because it was obvious she had _seen his dream about her._

“Oh! Right, sorry!” She waved her paw and the spiders all disappeared into some kind of black hole-looking thing, each spider getting sucked in backwards, and it made about as much sense as anything else, so Nick didn’t even question it. Judy made a groaning noise. “One of them left the wall and now I can’t sense it. If you find the missing widow, beat it to death, okay?”

“Screw you, Hopps,” shouted Judy’s other neighbor Evelyn, a dik-dik with no known surname whose shadowy past might have included a conviction (and this apartment building wasn’t even zoned for housing, so no one cared that she might be in violation of parole as long as she paid her bills in cash) for killing her husband.

“No thank you,” Judy shouted back sensibly. None of this registered until later; it was Nick’s turn to lose consciousness in someone else’s apartment. If anyone asked, it was just low blood sugar, thanks.

* * *

There was something about the twitch of a bunny’s nose that made Nick anxious. Judy’s nose twitched occasionally — it wasn’t really something she could control, for the most part — but never like _this._ She looked like the world would crash down on her at any second.

“I’ve been having trouble figuring out whether I’m asleep or awake,” she confessed, sitting next to him on her bed. He wasn’t touching the floor until that last black widow was found and destroyed; he wasn’t just soaking in her scent like a total loser. She didn’t seem particularly concerned either way. “I’m still not convinced this isn't a dream. Real life doesn't have creepy demon powers. The door turning into spiders is something that happens in dreams.”

Nick considered this very carefully and decided it made a lot of sense. A dream, after all, would explain the spiders. But it wouldn’t explain the _normal_ ness of everything else, and usually when Nick realized he was dreaming, he would wake up. If this were a dream, then hey, apparently he had weird dreams. If it were real, then...well, her words had been itching at him. “Why did you call yourself a demon? Out of all the words you could have chosen?”

“I guess it just seems right,” she replied thoughtfully, stretching out just a bit. He pretended his heart didn’t do a pirouette when her arm brushed against his. “I have this hazy memory of meeting a demon one day, when I was little. About ten. I think we made a deal…”

“...Obviously you asked it to help you make the world a better place.” He gave her a look he hoped said exactly what he thought about _that._ “What did it ask for in return?”

Because oh, hell. Nothing made sense anyway.

“Something about healing the Womb of Nehilim if he died? I don’t know, like I said, it’s hazy. I thought it was a dream. Demons aren’t _real.”_

“Maybe it was a dream. I mean, other than the spiders, which could be a shared hallucination, what proof do you have that you...have demon powers, and why are we having this conversation? It’s stupid. All the words that just came out of my mouth were stupid.”

“Dream invasion? I asked Dharma if she ever dreamed about being scolded in Cantonese, and she said yes. And you – I, uh. I heard you after my — your —  _our —_ that dream about…”

“We don’t need to talk about that,” he said hastily.

Her voice was much louder (and relieved) when she continued, “So then I went to the international market to test out whether I actually knew Cantonese, and apparently I know all the languages I hear, which will help me expand my client base, but probably isn’t very demon-y on its own. But I tried magic, and, well. Mixed results. So far it looks like I can’t do anything useful, like healing someone or creating food, but I can do some destructive things, like summoning spiders or starting fires. It looks like things that scare mammals are the easiest.”

“Okay,” he said, determined to be skeptical but also knowing Judy well enough to know that she wouldn’t be lying and her mental state was...more or less healthy. “What’s the Womb of Nihilism?”

“Nehilim. And...I don’t know. I mean, I _do_ know, but I don’t know how I know, so my knowing is suspicious.” She blinked. “You’re right, every word of this conversation is stupid. But I feel like it’s important, because I just got summoned this morning, and there was this _compulsion_ to make a deal with the deer who summoned me. So now I have to help him smite an enemy and I’m _pretty_ sure I could break the contract if I had the power of the Womb, although I don’t know what or where that is, or why I even know that to begin with.”

“You could have led with the whole...smiting thing,” he told her, trying to sound scolding but mostly unsuccessful. She wasn’t touching him enough to completely distract him from the implications, but she was touching him too much for him to _care_ about it. “I didn’t think that was still a thing.”

She rolled her eyes and scoffed, “I know, _right?_ Smiting! I just wish there were some _loophole…”_

The part of Nick’s brain that he’d always been reluctant to show her reared its eager head and raised its paw like a kit in school. He scrunched away from her and suggested, “I might be able to help, if I knew the exact wording.”

She looked at him for a long while with a neutral expression. It was an expression he’d seen on Kat Castleberry’s face both times she’d dropped in on Judy’s home office. Absolutely a face of judgment, he was sure, but he’d already put it out there, so he wasn’t going to take it back. Instead, he did what he did best in dumb situations and doubled down. “I’m serious, Fluff.”

“...He said, verbatim, _I wish to smite my enemy. If you call down your fury on Doethan Prongs, I will pledge my soul to you.”_

“And you _accepted,”_ Nick asked incredulously, because _honestly,_ what!?

She sat up straight and gestured grandly with her small paws, one ear cocked. “I panicked! Some weirdo was offering me his soul, and there was this pulsing inside demanding that I accept it because it was a deal, and I guess that’s important for some reason, so now I have to figure out what calling down fury means, do that, and...harvest his soul or something.” Her ears dipped low as she performed a rather spectacular facepalm à la Jean-Luc Panthard. “How do you do that? _Why_ would _anyone_ do that? Or pledge that?”

“Maybe it’s a demonology thing.” He grimaced and closed his eyes. “This morning I was an atheist.”

“Oh sweet cheese and crackers,” she groaned, sliding down so that they were lying side by side. When he peeked, her paw was still massaging her brow. He had a wild urge to do it for her, but refrained.

Curiously, he asked, “What is it, Carrots?”

“Oh, just the collapsing and rewriting of my worldview, is all. Factually, either I’m a freak of nature, we’re both sharing delusions, or at least one demon exists. Are there others? Are there gods? Am I gonna be...hunted, or something, just because I made an agreement with someone when I was ten? _How is a dream conversation with a minor legally binding?”_

Ah, screw it, she’d already seen him naked. He could give her a little comfort, right? As friends? Nick raised his paw and carefully began massaging the base of her ear, which he had seen her do before in times of stress. “That’s an open-ended deal. Firstly, if neither of you defined _call down fury,_ then it isn’t defined. It can mean whatever you want it to mean. You can give this Prongs guy a good scolding. And then...you can...huh. I don’t know enough about souls to interpret that part. Banish his soul to this Womb of Nevermore-”

“Nehilim.”

“Yeah, that’s what I said, the Womb of Nobody, and then follow it and find out what and where it is. That seems pretty easy. I’m more worried about that compulsion. That’s sketchy.”

The irony of Nick being able to call something sketchy was almost lost behind the sweet little sigh Judy gave him when his fingers closed over the left side of her ear fold, but Nick had always been reasonably good at mental multitasking, and also, _it was effing sketchy._ He couldn’t remember any mythology, but weren’t demons known for making deals? Or was that fairies? A trip to the library was probably warranted. There would be too much conflicting information on the internet due to new-age bastardization of religious myths. Animals these days were largely nonreligious; nobody needed all-powerful deities to explain why the stars existed when astrophysicists could explain what the stars were  _made of._ But...Judy was right. At least one demon existed.

Or…

“In the dream we shared,” he said reluctantly, because he didn’t really want to talk about it, “the...power, or whatever, called you a god, not a demon.”

“Whatever I am, I don’t want to be pressured into making deals,” she said. Sensible, as always.

“We can find a way around it,” he assured her. “Trust me, Fluff, this is what I _do.”_

His heart leapt with joy and terror when she sighed again and _almost_ snuggled into him. They were hardly touching, aside from his paw working her ears, but still, the way she bent suddenly felt more intimate. “Then, Nick Wilde, I guess this means we’re partners.”

He was 24, not 12. So he didn’t squeal like a kit at the thought of Judy Hopps, Ace Investigator — demon or delusional, who could be sure — hustling dumb mammals with him.

(But if his insides felt pleasantly like a pinball machine, that was nobody’s business but his.)

* * *

The demon thing was real, as Nick found out the hard way. After the joyful client thanked Judy for finding out that his husband was _not,_ in fact, sleeping with with the underage secretary and was instead in a consensual relationship with a sweet adult lynx named Olive, and she was helping the husband plan the client’s birthday (seriously? How did Judy manage to attract the nicest and most interesting cases? Cheating was _standard_ on bad TV), Judy turned to him and asked casually, “Should we go and see the summoner now?”

“Sure,” he replied, assuming they would take the train, or at least a Zuber.

Instead, she grabbed his paw firmly, closed her eyes, and dragged him through a dimension full of brightly-colored horrors. Shapes with no shape. Synthpop that possibly made his eye vessels burst. Sentient candy corns that chanted about the death of all things animate and inanimate. What seemed like the entirety of Flatland. It was a dimension that made him feel like he was dying, and when they exited out of a portal that was probably made of liquid nightmares, he pitched to his paws and knees, sure he was going to vomit.

He didn’t, but he did weird out the summoner, so there was that.

The summoner was a male deer of some kind, one that had a long black trench coat on. Indoors. For no reason. His walls were plastered with posters of off-brand pop metal bands with names like _Knife That Rabbit_ and _Ocelot Blood in My Hatestream,_ things...that were clearly _supposed_ to be female wolves but were either terribly drawn or purposely disproportionate, and vaguely occult symbols. A high school algebra textbook hid beneath a worn copy of Dosdogevsky’s _Crime and Punishment_ next to his laptop. He was wearing a faded tee that said, in bold, spiky red lettering, _I’m not shy; I’m just quietly examining my prey._

Ouch. Nick knew just the type. Culturally insensitive, blind to his own privilege, edgy-on-purpose, unable to stop himself from talking shit about everything that caused anyone joy, under the assumption that everyone stood in awe of his “air of danger.” If Nick wasn’t mistaken...yep, there was the curly band of gray spiraling each of his forearms, the weird dye job nobody in their right mind would ever want. Yikes.

“Oh, boy,” he stage-whispered. “Be careful around this guy.”

“And why,” said the douche imperiously, stars in his eyes as he looked at Judy, “did you bring along your vassal, My Liege?”

It was sheer willpower that kept Nick from bursting into laughter. This dipshit was _amazing._

“I did not give you permission to address me,” she said bluntly, and Nick fell a tiny bit more in love. She turned to Nick with a stern look, but she couldn’t hide the way her ears were turned back. “Deal with this mortal pest, my dear.”

Translation: _what the hell do I say to him!?_

“You promised my mistress-” Judy failed to stomp on his foot, as she wasn’t looking. Not that it would have done much, being as she weighed almost nothing, but it was the thought that counted, so he made a mental note to later be sad at her until at least dinnertime. She had most likely meant to work _with_ him, as a partner, but Nick knew that the best way to irritate this guy was to insult him. He was so lowly that he could only talk to a _servant._ “-that you pledge your eternal soul to her in exchange for her fury. How do you prefer we harvest your soul?”

The deer looked at Nick like he’d just turned on his high beams. “Harvest?” He turned to Judy. “My Liege-”

“Silence, Mortal,” Nick said sharply, imagining a certain douchebag’s face superimposed over this one’s. Just to help with authenticity, because otherwise he’d burst out laughing. After the Night Howler conspiracy had broken, all small predators had been added to the same protected-class list that bunnies and coyotes belonged to, and Nick’s teen years had become much less unpleasant. But before that, Nick had been lowest on the food chain. The jocks had been distracted enough by sports and homework and dating to ignore him, and most of the ones who might have been his bullies he’d done business with to protect himself, but mammals like this one had considered him fair game, a high-reward, low-risk target they could kick around to make themselves feel better about being creepy and undesirable. Taking a stab in the dark, he added, “This isn’t one of your self-insert fanfics. You don’t gain immortality, you don’t dominate the Dark Goddess in her own domain...you don’t even get the girl. So tell me, _worm,_ how would you like to spend your last moments after my mistress shows you her fury? Would you like to go in your sleep? Would you like to feel the exquisite agony of her paws rending your soul in pieces? Would you prefer the ecstasy of eternal torment?”

“Wait, what’s a fanfix,” Judy asked, eyeing Nick and the summoner in turns.

“What,” the deer stated rather than asked. He looked ill. Nick gave himself a pat on the back. Threats weren’t really his style, so freaking out this idiot was quite the accomplishment.

“I’ll tell you later, Mistress,” he said, adopting a fond smile on the outside, and feeling the age gap a little too strongly on the inside. “You’ve been out of the world too long.” He stared at the summoner. “Our mistress is capricious and loves her amusements, but there is still the matter of your fee.”

“I pledged my soul,” sneered the summoner, whose name Nick really needed to get. When the deer shot up quickly to tower over them both, Nick’s fur bristled and he fought down the urge to growl at (or run away from) the threat. He looked down on them, angry, and stomped his hoof. Judy tensed beside Nick. He knew that she boxed sometimes, but he had no idea if that would translate well to real-world threats, especially those that were so much bigger. Was she even good at it? He wasn’t at all proficient in self-defense, having spent most of his life developing more charismatic skills, and oh God, they were going to die, weren’t they?

“To my mistress, yes,” he said anyway, because they couldn’t run, but Nick’s mouth still worked, and that was his best weapon. “Which means that your soul is hers to use as she sees fit...provided you still want Doethan Prongs to be dealt with.”

“Yes, why is that,” Judy asked suddenly, and when Nick took her in, he was surprised to see that she looked a little constipated. Huh. She raised an eyebrow — of course she would, it was _Judy._ The Eyebrow was the way she made herself look less cute. “What has he done to deserve my fury?”

The summoner said nothing. Nick was about to say something caustic about the idiot not deserving Judy’s attention, but then Judy did...something. The entire room seemed to fold in on itself with a great _heave-ho_ and suddenly, Nick found himself in someone else’s skittering thoughts, topics layered atop each other, flickers of faces and gibberish playing through his own mind. It wasn’t so much a movie as a disorganized junk drawer, and Nick could hardly _breathe_ until the relevant topics sorted themselves out and showed themselves.

“Stop, stop, stop,” begged the deer, hunching over and putting his hooves over his eyes. He sounded pained. _“Please_ stop!”

Doethan Prongs...was a college student, a junior, with impressive antlers and a wolf girlfriend named Miranda Moonsilver. She was a sophomore with a 3.75 GPA who went jogging every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday and had a voice like an angel, whose teeth were sharp and shiny, who shared a class with the summoner, Malcolm _Velvet —_ ah. Oh, gross. This was all about jealousy.

He glanced at Judy, who looked as thunderous as her voice when she asked, “Did you really think she’d choose _you_ if he was out of the way? She doesn’t even like you!”

“She doesn’t know if she likes me. He’s always hovering, making sure she can’t talk to me,” Velvet retorted, but it sounded weak, and he looked sad, rocking back and forth on the floor. He had been forced to relive his own memories, and since it was _his brain,_ he hadn’t been so detached from them. Well, he deserved to suffer, the entitled prick. Now that the memory storm was gone, the room seemed almost faded.

“We’ll give him what he deserves,” Judy promised, the power of her voice thrumming through Nick’s body. Oh, no. “Won’t we, my dearest?”

“Yes, Mistress,” Nick replied cheekily. Still playing a part, as always. “As for you, Malcolm Velvet. You belong to the dark goddess now, don’t you?”

Velvet got onto his knees and bowed his head to the floor. “I belong to you, My Liege.”

“That’s right, you do.”

Although her tone was only tinged with smugness, the words thrilled Nick. Judy was usually fairly upbeat. She’d been knocked down by bigots and harsh expectations, but it hadn’t soured her worldview much, and she had never showed many signs of that Millennial cynicism their generation was known for; this, though, sounded _dark._ Commanding. It reminded him of their shared dream – no, not _now,_ he couldn’t think of that right now! He took a shaky breath and stepped back into the role he’d decided to play. “We’ll be back for payment when we’ve finished dealing with Prongs.”

“And I’m taking this book,” Judy added randomly, holding up a thick tome that was bigger than her head. Before Velvet could respond, Judy grabbed Nick’s paw and dragged him through the wretched technicolor hellscape once more.

* * *

After a very spirited chastisement of Doethan Prongs’ questionable wardrobe and a warning to treat Miranda right, Judy and Nick were holed up in the university library, the thick book between them. It was called _A Historical Overview of_ _Superstitions in the Miskaton Valley Region,_ and it had what seemed to be paw-written addendums inserted into the back. An entire new section, including a horrible suicide note written in blood, detailed the so-called true happenings in a town called Anchorhead. Written almost entirely in second-person by a female ocelot, it seemed like the ramblings of a madmammal...if it weren't plausible. The writer, too, mentioned the Womb of Nehilim, and the name of a terrible dark god:

_Ialdabaoloth._

Apparently, it was Judy’s “calling name,” and considering how _almost_ summoning a prior incarnation had basically leveled an entire town, Nick was not inclined to trust these new powers, especially since they belonged to a title whose very name nauseated him.

“I’m getting something,” she said softly, one ear on him and the other cocked. Her eyes looked so far away. “The Womb is supposed to be the realm of gods, but it was corrupted by the —  _faith_ of mortal cultists. Without the Womb, all the gods died but one, a demon god, and he was already mad, so much so that he couldn’t change form anymore, so he could not be Called like I can. I saw him in my dream, this massive writhing of tentacles and one great big eye, just like the book says, but he...could understand me. He said my head was the first place that felt like home.”

That a ten-year-old bunny’s brain felt like home to an ancient, decaying demon god was probably something to worry about, but she was so _nice._ Kits were weird anyway. “So how did you become him?”

“I remember now why I was dreaming. I fell off the Star Tree and broke my neck. I was dying, and all I wanted was to fix things. There were things I wanted to do, mammals I wanted to help. He was trapped in my head, _because_ I was dying. Our deal was that I would be allowed to live on, and everyone I was connected to would have a chance at happiness...and in return, when he dissolved like the other gods, I would use his powers to find or heal the Womb. That part is still unclear. So, I guess I’m not really a demon, I just inherited a title.”

“Why do you need to heal the Womb,” he asked, leaning back on his paws to stretch his upper back.

“Oh.” She shrugged halfheartedly and closed the book. “It’s rotting from the inside. Spiritual necrosis. It’s full of obscure magic and horrors, I think? Anyway, the more it decays, the more likely it will be for the demon horde to get out, I’m pretty sure. The gods didn’t care about whether this realm lived or died; I think he just wanted the abominations purged. Either that or he  _wanted_ them let out, who knows? But I care about this realm. So I have to do it. Plus, I think I can use the power of the Womb to cancel out the compulsion on me to come when summoned and make deals. I already need to make another one.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” he suggested, but drew back slightly when she perked up. Her eyes went shiny and she seemed to vibrate in place. Her pink gingham shirt seemed out of place next to the sudden congregation of shadows either surrounding her or caressing her or...well, it was an interesting optical illusion, whatever it was.

“What _kind_ of deal,” she purred. Yeesh, that was creepy, which begged the question: why did he find it attractive? Not cool, Nick. Not cool at all.

He swallowed and threw on an easy, teasing smile, ignoring all the tender little feelings in his chest, because they were dumb and inconvenient at the moment. “I’ll buy you pizza tonight if you’ll buy me some kind of takeout tomorrow.”

The shadows stopped. Her eyes lost their eerie shine. Her smile looked less...hungry, and more pleasant. “I accept. Wow. I feel so much better!”

He snorted. Somehow, he doubted that the gods had had pizza in mind when they’d begun making deals with mortals, but hey, a loophole was a loophole. And as a bonus, they’d be having dinner together two days in a row.

“I guess we should go deal with Malcolm Velvet now,” she said reluctantly, pulling the book close to her chest. It disappeared. She jerked and blinked, and it reappeared. Disappeared. Reappeared. Her smile was brilliant. “Cool! I never have to carry around a pawbag again! Okay, Nick, let’s go.”

“Okay, but can we not-”

And they were off again, through the tangible synthpop, through Flatland, and Nick was sure his brain was getting scrambled by giant egg beaters, and a question mark carrying a basket of flowers told him silently not to take the number 5 bus on September 3 in 2041, and a gray, formless marching band played brightly-colored bubbles that tasted like fruits, and he hated every single second of it.

Even the trombone blueberries.

When they exited, followed by the lemon trill of a piccolo, Velvet made an awful noise that sounded like the lovechild of panic and a squeaky clarinet and jumped, clicking the X on his browser. Judging by the look of disgust on Judy’s face, Nick didn’t want to know.

“My Liege,” Velvet said breathlessly, bowing awkwardly in his chair. Had he forgotten about the part where he was about to lose his soul? Or was he just hoping he would be able to endear himself to her through submission? That was dumb! Judy didn’t need a servant, she already had Nick! ...As a _partner._ A deal-maker. A _friend._ (Hopefully something new, maybe, someday.) Malcolm Velvet was creepy and gross for summoning her to kill for lust, and Nick was not at all jealous of the idea of some dick running errands for her and getting praised for doing a good job and _anyway,_ the point was, it wouldn’t work. Velvet was a jerk.

“I’m going to collect on your end of the deal now,” Judy told Velvet. It was a sweet, darling little utterance that contrasted with the brewing power Nick could feel running beneath his fur and along the line of his teeth. It tasted like battery acid and sparkles.

“I-I’m eternally yours,” said the douchedeer.

Judy gestured toward the rumpled bed that Nick had been ignoring, mostly because it smelled of sleep-sweat and the sheets were black silk, because _of course_ they were. The sheets began to writhe like vipers in a pit, and then a bell sounded from somewhere, and Malcolm Velvet shrieked. His eyes bugged out, turned red, his neck swelled and made his whole face look grotesque, almost cartoonish. The tips of his ears began to unravel and stretch toward the sheets, which had turned into an inky vortex that smelled like cotton candy.

Judy looked sick. Nick didn’t mention it.

All of a sudden, as though something had _yanked_ him backward, Velvet shot toward the bed, unraveling and stretching as he did so. He screamed so loudly that it felt like the little dorm room was an echo box, and it went on and on and _on—_

“Well, that was weird,” he said, once the screaming stopped and the portal shriveled to nothing. The room looked entirely untouched. Judy’s fur looked especially shiny now that the deed was done; he wondered if it was a side effect of the spell or of his stubbornly unacknowledged feelings. Either was equally likely. “I’d say he got what he deserved.”

“I don’t know, Nick.”

He put his arm around her and pulled her close. _As friends._ “Carrots, he wanted you to kill someone because he thought he’d be able to bango the bongo if Doethan Prongs was out of the way. That’s eleven kinds of messed up.”

“Yeah, but...did I do the right thing? His soul, tormented for eternity in that _place..._ not to mention, if I figure out how to heal the Womb, then he’ll be…”

“You fulfilled both parts of the deal,” he said firmly, trying not to think of what might happen to a soul when the realm was purged or whatever. He had to believe _they_ had made the right decision. Normally his hustles didn't hurt anyone; he didn't even do his mother’s signature seduction scam because broken hearts didn't feel like acceptable collateral damage, even if seduction was easy and reliable.

“And we'll never see him again,” she said, sounding stronger. “The book said it's impossible to escape the Womb.”

He nodded. If his nose happened to brush her ear, it wasn't weird, and she didn't seem to mind. “Yeah. He's out of our lives for good.”


	3. The Happytown Hustlers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nick's a master at the short game, but Judy needs something a little more long-term.

They fell into a nice groove. For the next month, whenever Judy started craving deals, she would come to Nick and make a deal with him: maybe a shinier coat to attract customers in exchange for a pizza, or some clerical work in exchange for a teleportation up to Arcadia for their indie film festival. They were small deals, things that he could still do on his own. Nothing world-changing or habit-forming, just enough to keep her weird new demon urges satisfied and have a little fun. In the meantime, somehow, they’d started working both of their jobs together. Nick took a more active role in her PI practice, and she occasionally accompanied him on his hustles. He usually favored classic gold brick stuff, upselling elephant-sized ice creams or paying donors for fur that he and Finnick would fashion into “deluxe” rugs. It was easy, it was safe, and Judy had stopped him from selling a skunk-butt rug to a lovely old shrew who’d turned out to be a crime boss’ grandmother (one day he’d ask how she’d _known that),_ so it wasn’t anything that would come back to bite him in his own shapely rear.

Everybody left happy.

“So it’s all in the wording,” Judy was saying, squinting down at the little notepad she used to keep her thoughts in order as she learned the art of the hustle. A deal-making demon needed to understand loopholes; they both felt a little bad still about the way they’d handled the soul issue with her first summoning, and Nick knew that with time and preparation, not to mention understanding of the extent of Judy’s new powers, they could have done better. Probably.

“Yeah, that was lesson number one,” he replied, distracted by the line of customers. He was wearing the pale green Tommy Bapawma shirt she’d cursed to bring him attention (in exchange for giving her a calf massage two weeks prior, which had been one of the most nerve-wracking experience of his entire adult life), so he’d made double the ice creams just in case.

“Right, I just…” She huffed, ears stiff and foot thumping. In contrast, she was looking sweet in her blue ribbed tank top and gray leggings, but she couldn’t hide the firmness of her muscles or the tension in her shoulders. They were working Sahara Square because her most recent investigation was to keep an eye on a lemming banker, so Finnick had deigned to take the day off to give them “alone time,” for whatever reason. Finnick was an even bigger troll than Nick was, but he was handy with a baseball bat, so Nick didn’t ever give him trouble for it. Judy was still talking, but Nick had spaced a little, so he only caught the tail end of her sentence. “...scrambling the meaning to give them what they ask for without giving them what they _want.”_

Ah, an ethics question. The plague of hustlers everywhere. Contrary to popular belief, even hardcore con artists had consciences; it was all about finding the gray area, usually by assuming everyone was wily and simply _chose_ to be taken in. After all, it wasn’t hard to learn what scams were out there; Wikipawdia actually had an entire section on classic confidence games, so anyone who fell for them just _wanted_ to be tricked.

He shrugged and slipped off his aviators, as eye contact was essential to looking trustworthy to the paying customers getting closer and closer. “It’s just a shift in thinking, Carrots. You already do it when you’re doing a quick undercover investigation, you just don’t call it a con. This particular hustle is legal, right? There’s nothing illegal about buying ingredients from a third party, I add a pawful of extra sugar to the jar before I re-freeze the ice cream, and I have my own brand name. I have the right permits under my legal name and my DBA. It’s not _really_ a benign little game; mammals are getting hurt in a sense. Jumbeaux, for one, although we don’t care about him because he’s a speciesist dick, and whoever buys these treats, because I’ve taken creative liberties with the meaning of organic. I’m making money by screwing over or misleading so-called innocent mammals. But it’s fine, because nobody _actually_ gets hurt, nobody gets any money stolen, and we all go home happy. You just have to think in terms of _technically_ and _in this case_ and _functionally speaking._ Trust me, I’ve been doing it since I was born.”

“Yes,” Judy said patiently, but there was something steely in her words. “That’s exactly the difference. Ruth is a lovely vixen-”

Nick snorted. His mother was a  _ terror,  _ and he wasn’t convinced Judy’s bimonthly teas with her — started about a year prior, when they’d met outside his door while he was out busting his tail crafting rugs and Judy had invited her in for some carrot cake — weren’t a sneaky attempt to convert his super cool neighbor to the dark side of the  _ social arts. _

“-but she’s a con artist, and she raised _you_ to be a con artist, and that’s the way you think because she taught you that. My parents didn’t really care much what we did, since there was no way to keep track of all 298 of us and there wasn’t a lot to get up to in _Bunnyburrow,_ but we’d get a spanking if we lied about it. I admire the Slick Nick side of you even when it’s _unbearably_ cute, and yeah, I sometimes use it as a model for my little undercover things. It’s just...hard to adopt that as a life philosophy.”

Nick opened his mouth to respond...and left it open as the reason for the slow speed of his customer line was made apparent. The lemmings were shambling _wrecks._ All of them looked to be in various states of decay, their once-pristine suits torn and oozing fluids, and _these weren’t business suits, they were funeral suits,_ and oh, no.

“Zombies,” he said dumbly, pointing at them. “Zombies. In Zootopia.”

Judy was shaking violently next to him, and it took Nick a moment to recognize the feel of her trying to contain her rapidly-growing powers. She could do nice-enough things with them while making deals, but if she wanted to use magic for her own benefit, it was _always_ destructive. She seemed to glow, shadows gathering behind her like a shroud, and Nick realized it was time to abandon ship. That was thirty bucks and an afternoon in Tundratown wasted, but he didn’t want her to accidentally set fire to the nice bank next to them, so he spun on his heel, grabbed her paw, and said, “Run!”

They ran, and ran, and kept running. Through the Square, around the fountain, across the street, and into an alley they went, Judy’s paw feeling soft and electric in his. Despite his longer frame, their legs were about the same length, so they could easily run side by side at the same pace, and aside from the whole zombie thing, and the fact that in a day or so he was going to regret not working out very much, he thought it was...nice.

When they emerged on the other side of the alley, Judy halted suddenly and pulled him back into the shadows by his tie, letting go of his paw to wrap her small arm around his torso. His breath hitched. This was a weird place and an inappropriate time for a first kiss, but that was cool, neither of them were very traditional, and then—

—oh, _nuts,_ there was the stupid lemon piccolo player again. Piccolo was the _worst,_ and so were lemons, and he was kind of disappointed to be teleporting instead of kissing, although this actually made more sense and why hadn’t they just teleported in the first place? Well, it wasn’t really Judy’s fault. She used her powers so sparingly that she’d probably forgotten she could do this at all until logic overrode panic.

“Okay,” he said, stumbling out of the exit portal. Judy did not let go of his tie, which was kind of awesome. Not that it meant anything until they decided it meant something, just like the rest of these little unacknowledged intimate moments. Practicality and conscience warred in his head while his mouth asked, “Was it okay to just leave the zombies to march through the Square like that?”

“They’re tied to me,” she said shortly, tugging on his tie a bit so he had to bend over, and loosened it enough to pull his collar out from under it. Her paws went immediately to the buttons of his shirt, and _what what what?_ Was this — they were in a public _restroom,_ this was totally inappropriate, they were going to get _caught,_ and also he hadn’t exactly consented to anything, but she was already continuing, “I’ve felt it all day, but I didn’t know what it was until you noticed them. They’re going to follow us. Here, help me out, we need to get this shirt off of you. We don’t want extra attention.”

Oh, right. He liked that shirt a lot, and also, he felt weird about being stripped like a child in a public restroom. On the other paw, he was actually wearing a tank top underneath, because a cursed shirt had the potential to be a drawback in some situations — situations exactly like this. And Judy knew it. She was a take-charge kind of bunny; she was already halfway out the door, leaving Nick to catch up with an awkward running step. He followed her out, stepping into what seemed to be a Rainforest District laundromat, and she covertly dropped his shirt into a basket of someone’s dirty laundry. Smart. Nick probably would have just hidden it somewhere, come back for it later when it was safe. Unfortunately, he still had that homeless mentality, the need to hold onto items of value. He had little caches all over the city that he never visited.

He had ten of those shirts, mostly in pale colors. He didn’t need _that one._

“Wish you would have asked first,” he grumbled anyway as they headed out of the door, mostly for the principle of the thing, and because he sometimes couldn’t tell if she was fussing over him because she liked him like he liked her or because she thought of him as a kit still. Notably, she’d stopped calling him that in the month they’d been working closely together, but…

It wasn’t the time to think about that. They were being pursued by zombies, apparently, which, _what the fuck,_ and anyway, being her friend was great. Other feelings were beside the point, and could be suppressed, if necessary.

“Sorry. I was panicked. I still am. You should hear my heart,” she murmured, leaning in slightly as they walked. They were on the outskirts, closer to the Meadowlands than anywhere else, but it was still visibly rainforest, giant trees hiding the sprinklers that helped the district thrive. Nick wasn’t a huge fan of the rainforest, but he didn’t complain, because at least they hadn’t gotten their brains eaten.

He laughed and slipped his arm around her shoulders so they could talk more quietly. Just two close friends out for a stroll. Nothing to see there, nothing at all. “I look silly with a tie and no collar.”

She threaded her fingers through his beltloop instead of trying to return his hug. His hip tingled, but at least they weren’t walking awkwardly. Judy was so sensible. It wasn’t fair. “It’s fine, Nick. That was the style when I was your age.”

“Yeah, I remember. You’re not _that_ much older than me.”

“Eight years is a lot,” she mused, sounding a little sad.

Now _his_ heart was being stupid. Thanks, Judy. He hoped she couldn’t hear it, but she probably could. “I don’t think so. It’s not two decades or anything.”

She stopped short and stepped to the side to stand under the relatively dry branch of a giant tree. He followed, as they were still attached. She turned to look at him directly and said softly, almost wistfully, “This last month has put a lot of things in perspective for me, and this — zombie attack, which I can’t believe we have to say out loud, has made me realize how mortal you are. You’re right, eight years isn’t  _ that  _ much, but I don’t know how long I’m going to live. I don’t know if I’ll be immortal or if the power will kill me before I’m 40. I don’t know whether I’ll age, or whether I’ll lose my bunny form and just exist as a big creepy eyeball monster. I originally turned down Ethan Longfoot because it wouldn’t have been fair to him if I dated him while I was thinking about  _ you,  _ because you’re — you’re fun, and you’re sweet when you’re not paying attention, but you’re also so unspeakably rude sometimes, and you treat me like I’m just another mammal instead of a cute, delicate bunny, and you make me laugh, and I know how you feel about me. I feel the same, you have to know that, but now it’s not fair to  _ you  _ to ask you to...to give me time that one or both of us might not have.”

He couldn’t help but gape at her. Was  _ that  _ all? Sure, those were legitimate concerns,  _ if you were a complete idiot.  _ There was only so much time in the world anyway. Even if she hadn’t been granted these weird powers, either one of them could have died at any time. There was a risk every second of every day. Their apartment could burn down. One of them could get hit by a bus or stabbed. They could go to a doctor for a minor illness, have an allergic reaction to prescribed medication, and die. Or the minor illness could actually be malignant, inoperable tumors. They could choke on their food or get squashed by an absent-minded elephant. Judy had once flushed herself down a toilet to escape a bad situation; what other weird things did she do when he wasn’t looking? In any case, none of those reasons were real deterrents. If anything, they were reasons not to  _ waste  _ the time that they had!

“None of that matters to me,” he said vehemently, but quietly, into her ear, and put his other arm around her too, so that they were almost hugging. He met her eyes. He saw visions of his death in her gaze — not guaranteed, since all six of those deaths were different — but that was normal now, and it hardly phased him. He’d just make sure not to take the number 5 bus on September 3 in 2041. “I will concede that gods existed at one time, but clearly they’re all dead now unless you’ve become one. I don’t believe in an afterlife, so it’s important to live while we can. I thought I learned that from you. Have I read you wrong all this time?”

“You’re right. I’m being overprotective and dumb.” She stepped closer and fiddled with the tip of his tie, took a deep breath, and asked, “Nicholas Piberius Wilde, will you go out with me?”

“Only if you’ll go out with me,” he teased.

“And...will you kiss me?”

He thought about it. “Do you know how far away the zombies are?”

“At least fifteen minutes out, unless they figure out how to run.”

He leaned down. She pressed up. Their lips met…

...and his muzzle was a weird shape for kissing, and their teeth clacked, and every part of him from his ears to his heels and tail-tip felt like it was singing or getting shock therapy or something, and her tight grip on his tie hurt the back of his neck a little, and they were saved from further awkwardness when the sprinklers came on and soaked them both.

He grinned. “Apparently, I’m a terrible kisser.”

“No, you’re not! We’re just not immediately compatible, is all. We’ll figure it out later,” she promised through a laugh.

* * *

They wandered around the city paw in paw, discussing their options, trying not to stay in one place lest the zombies find them. Nick hoped they weren’t making more zombies during their march through Zootopia, but Judy didn’t think so; they were literally the walking dead, not TV zombies. Whether they had killed anybody was another story, but considering that Judy was probably the only one in the city who could deal with the army of magically-undead mammals, keeping themselves safe until they could figure out _how_ was a priority.

“I still don’t understand why the zombies are _lemmings,”_ she lamented.

“Oh, that one’s easy,” he replied. He needed a coffee. Maybe they could teleport to a coffee house soon. “To get a reanimated corpse you need a _corpse,_ right? Well, most mammals burn their dead. Red foxes don’t, and neither do shrews, and neither do lemmings. I don’t know what other species has burial rites, but there’s a big lemming plot in the Sahara. It makes sense.”

“Okay, that answers that question, but now we have to figure out how they can die twice. Is it unethical to kill them if they’re undead?”

Nick let out a surprised little yip of laughter. “Seriously, Carrots? You’re asking that question?”

“It’s a reasonable question! Is it murder? Do they have souls? _How_ were they reanimated? Will the...spell, or whatever, wear off? If we hurt them, does the damage show up on the mammal who did it?”

“You are within your rights to defend yourself.” He bumped her with his hip, which was more awkward than he’d expected, because they were still walking. His feet were starting to hurt. Even his tail was less lively, just sort of hanging there, swishing incidentally with the sway of his hips. He was going to have to clean it later, which was always a pain in the...well. “Those questions are good ones, but irrelevant, in my expert opinion.”

 _“Expert?_ Nick!”

“I saw them a couple of seconds before you did, ergo, I am the resident expert, having more experience than you,” he bragged. Sort of. He wasn’t sure that a few seconds of visual experience with fictional monsters was a braggable achievement.

“Well, if we could get one and tie it up, we could probably follow the power trail to the source of the reanimation. I’m starting to get a feel for magic, or whatever these powers are. I can sense the zombies. But I don’t know if we could separate one from the crowd.” Suddenly, her ears turned to the left, or he assumed they did. He could feel one of them against his bicep. “Did you hear that?”

“I hear lots of things,” he grumped, jealous of her hearing. His was no joke, but he had nothing on her. “What _that_ are you talking about?”

“Maybe nothing. I just thought I heard someone scream, but I didn’t hear it again. C’mon, let’s teleport again. I’ll take us to that nice little coffee house in Arcadia. I can’t believe we didn’t think of that before. Either the zombies will start walking hundreds of miles north, or they’ll lose their connection to us,” she suggested, and Nick thought it was a pretty good idea.

* * *

Where Zootopia was a shining example of innovation and cooperation and cutting-edge technology, Arcadia was more like a cultural patchwork quilt. Since it lacked climate controls, there was a certain type of mammal that was most suited to thrive there, and there weren’t many amenities for anything larger than a coyote. Nick, having grown up in the largest, most liberal city in Animalia, found it strange. Judy, having grown up in a largely homogenous farming town, said it reminded her a little of her high school.

The coffee house in question was a hidden gem in the city center, decorated with fairy lights and staffed by mammals all across the species spectrum. There was a sign on the counter that said _We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Bigots,_ and they were participants in the Open World program, an effort to feed homeless and otherwise impoverished mammals. They served the best carrot cake outside of Bunnyburrow, and the drip coffee was always perfect.

“I think I could live here,” Judy said, her mug of coffee just a couple of inches away from her mouth. She liked the warmth and the scent more than the taste, apparently, but she also refused to “ruin it” with cream and sugar. She was weird though, so whatever.

“I couldn’t.” Nick eyed her carrot cake. Half the cream cheese frosting was piled on the side of her plate for some incomprehensible reason. “There are too many trees and not enough mammals. How would I work?”

“You’d have to be a _kept fox,”_ she teased, nudging his leg with her toes. He didn’t jump, but it was a near thing. Bunnies weren’t as cuddly as popular media played them up to be, but recently, she had been much more tactile with him. Every touch felt like a gift, coming from her, because Nick _was_ tactile, even if he didn’t let on very often. He liked positive attention and he liked being touched and sometimes he stuffed a pillowcase with hot water bottles at night so he could curl around something and pretend he was cuddling with a real mammal, which...okay, that was a little pathetic, wasn’t it?

Keeping the conversation going, he pretended disdain when he asked, “Kept by whom? You?”

She shrugged and wiggled her eyebrows inexpertly. It was adorable. “If you want, but you’ve seen how I live. Better to find a sugar mama, though. Or a sugar daddy, whichever creams your Twinkie.”

Nick choked on his mouthful of coffee, because _what._ “Fluff, I can’t believe you said that.”

“Said what,” she asked, frowning and setting down her mug with a quiet _clink_ against the glass tabletop. “They’re not great, but I ate them as a kit. They were really cheap back then, so we could buy in bulk, and then on Fridays those of us who went off to school instead of doing packets at home could have a treat in our lunchboxes.”

He stared. Did she really not see how suggestive that had been? Well, maybe not. Country humor seemed to be just as dirty as city humor could be, but didn’t contain many euphemisms. Judy had been a resident of Zootopia for a decade now, but still...no, there was her sneaky little smile. She was messing with him, using folksy charm and stereotypical bunny naivety as a cover.

“I could never tell if I liked them or not,” he told her, tilting his head down so he could look up at her through his lashes. He ran a claw-tip around the shape of the spoon they’d given him for the cream and sugar. “They have a strange scent, and the cake part is...well, it’s either too soft or too hard, but never in between. The middle’s pretty good, though.” He stirred his coffee for no reason. Her eyes followed his paw. He lowered his voice into something a little warmer. “I usually just squirt the cream out of it and swallow that down.” He licked the spoon free of coffee, curling his tongue around the wide dip and brushing his lips from the middle to the top. “It’s actually pretty tasty, now that I think about it, if you don’t think too hard about what it is or where it comes from.”

“You’ve never done that in your life,” she accused unsteadily, which was actually true, but she didn’t need to know that.

“Done what,” he asked innocently, fluttering his lashes a little. “Eaten a Twinkie? I know I was poor growing up, but it’s like you said. A cheap treat for a special occasion.”

“W-well, we can’t kill zombies with kithood treats, so maybe a change of subject is in order?”

Nick decided not to tease her for that artless little fumble, because she’d either get _too_ embarrassed or find a way to turn it back on him, and either one was equally likely. Instead, he nodded and told her, “Our best bet is to find whoever reanimated the corpses, or at least, that seems like the best course of action to me. Do we need to kitnap a zombie for that? Or will just being _near_ one work?”

“We should probably make a plan for both, because I’m not sure,” she said.

As they got down to business, she ran her toes against his calf again, and he melted internally.


	4. My Hero, Snidely Whiplash

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nick and Judy continue to Nick and Judy, even through a demon summoning and a zombie invasion.

Nick stood guard at the door of a shed on the Disney Coast, splitting his attention between the empty beach and Judy. Their captive, a moaning, shuffling, undead lemming, didn’t struggle much against its bonds, probably because it didn’t have enough of a mind to know that was a thing. One day Nick would ask how Judy had gotten so proficient with using jute rope to tie mammals up to keep them immobile, but not until their zombie problem had been fixed.

“I feel like this was too easy,” she mused, circling the former lemming with a frown. “I don’t even remember how we got here. Do you?”

“No,” he conceded with a shrug. Nick hoped a random detailed flashback to the events of 10 minutes ago might shed light on the situation, but alas, his memories remained clouded. He wasn’t too worried, although he knew he should be. Was it some magical interference? A glitch in the matrix? Were they the victims of cosmic laziness? Whatever it was, they had a captive zombie. That was the most important thing. He would fret when he got that particular ability back…

...Or, hopefully, he _wouldn’t_ get that back, since it was inconvenient.

“As far as I knew, I was the only one with any kind of weird magical powers, or whatever it is I inherited. I guess it makes sense that there are others, because otherwise how could anyone summon me? And it’s not like I know how to work this power, or what the limits are, or how that summoning actually works, because I have a life and you and a job to do, none of which actually need stupid magical powers. Magic is stupid, and it causes more problems than it fixes, so...well, the point is,” Judy said, squatting down to prod the zombie, “I can feel — I think — three weird... _threads_ coming out of this body. One is tied to me, one feels like the other zombies, and one extra. If we follow the thread, we can probably find the mammal who’s causing problems. If it’s a mammal. Maybe not all of the gods are dead? No, I’m pretty sure they are…”

“How do we follow that thread,” he asked curiously, looking over the lemming with a weird combination of interest and disgust. It was looking pretty dead, which was why its feeble wriggling was giving him the heebie-jeebs.

“I can just...feel it,” Judy replied. Her face went into a pout that Nick thought was kind of amazing. Even when she was sulking, she looked just a tidge dangerous. Probably not to a stranger, but Nick had seen her take down a particularly belligerent bear who hadn’t liked being caught. “It’s like something calling me — like a summoning, but weaker, and not so...insistent.”

Because Nick had never been summoned, he had no idea what she was talking about, but he nodded sagely, because he had plenty of idea how to _pretend_ he knew what she was talking about. It was weird, but most mammals were too afraid to ask out loud if he _actually_ understood what they were talking about, unless they were speciesist, which was an easy out anyway.

Hey, if it was gonna happen, why not use it to his advantage?

“I think if I focus hard enough, I can take us to the source, like a reverse summoning. Or Calling, or whatever it’s called. I think it’s a summoning if I’m in eyeball-form, but...I actually don’t know if I’ll ever _have_ an eyeball form?” She huffed. “Unimportant right now. The point is, I think I can get us there.”

He felt touched, and a bit frightened, that she was including him in her plans. Touched, because he liked being an _us_ with her. Frightened, because he was a tiny mortal, and she was a tiny demon-god-thing, and what if they both died? Would zombies take over? Not that _he_ would care, if he was already dead, but like, Finnick didn’t deserve to get eaten by a zombie. “Get _us_ there?”

Her face fell. “Oh, right, I should have...I can drop you off at the Grand Pangolin Arms before I try to find the source; I don’t expect you to-”

“Obviously I’m coming,” he said, cutting her off before she could trip over her own weird apology. “It’s just that after you had that whole spiel about me being mortal and all of that, I sort of thought you’d try to keep me out of it.”

“The best way to keep you safe is to keep you close,” she explained logically, gesturing at the zombie. It wasn’t wriggling as much. Nick wasn’t sure whether that was good or not. “I’ve always thought that was weird — keeping someone out of the loop doesn’t keep them safe, it only allows you to lose track of them. Plus, you’re clever. I know if I wanted anyone to back me up, it’d be you.” She stood up from her crouch and stretched her back with her paws on her hips, and Nick felt his stomach do a little swoop downward. He tried not to think about it. She straightened up and grinned. “I’ve learned more about the way mammals work in the past month from you than I did in my entire two-year apprenticeship with Kat. It means a lot. Thank you for letting me into your world.”

“My world _is_ pretty fantastic,” he said quickly, hoping a little bit of fast-talking and pizazz might cover the wild beating of his heart. How was it that she knew how to get to him so easily? Calling him clever, wanting to keep him safe...those things weren’t things mammals did, not for Nick Wilde. “There’s no one better than me currently in the biz, you know. I could sell you your nana’s underpants, if I wanted, or take your wallet out of-”

Somehow, she was suddenly _so close._ A month ago, he might have figured that he’d been so busy tooting his own horn he hadn’t noticed her move, but he was pretty sure she had _actually_ teleported into his space, which was totally unfair and kind of hot. She pulled him down to eye level by gently tugging on his tie, and he never wanted to take it off again if he could share air like this with _Judy Hopps,_ and he felt fuzzy and warm, and when he saw dancing nightmares in her eyes the warmth went _straight_ to his dick, because of course it did. _Way to go, Nick._ With hardly any space between their mouths, Judy said, “You don’t have to pretend with me. I like you because of who you are.”

Somehow, that was the sweetest thing anyone had ever said to him, which was sort of sad, but at least it had been said, and by someone he cared for. Trying to breathe normally, he told her, “I’m going to kiss you now, Judy Hopps.”

But before he could, the zombie groaned and thrashed, and they both jumped back, startled. God _dammit,_ Nick was sure some cosmic force was conspiring against him, because apparently cosmic forces existed. That opened up a whole new world; he could now blame all his bad luck on gods or demons or magic or whatever, and nobody could contradict him. Well, nobody in the know. Which...was more or less just Judy, and he had a feeling she liked it when mammals took responsibility, so that actually didn’t open up any doors after all.

Bummer.

“We’re going to find out where the zombies are coming from,” she said with a vicious kick at the animated corpse, “and then we’re going to stop this, and I’m going to get that kiss from you if I have to tear apart the entire fabric of space and time to do it.”

“That might just be the hottest thing anyone has ever said, ever, in the history of all things,” he replied with his most charming smile. _She_ certainly looked charmed, ears on high alert and large front teeth biting her lower lip, paws fiddling with each other. “So let’s do this thing.”

* * *

If he had to use one word to describe the state of Zootopia when they arrived through the bizarro dimension they used to teleport, Nick would have chosen the word _chaos._ Nobody asked him to do that, though, because that would be dumb. Instead, everybody was just kind of screaming and running from the shuffling, moaning horde. It was significantly bigger than it had been previously, and Nick realized that they had most definitely miscalculated. The zombie army was making more soldiers.

“But...I don’t _sense_ them,” Judy said blankly. “The other zombies aren’t even _dead.”_ She perked up, though, which was good, because Nick didn’t like to see her sad, but he wasn’t very good at saying optimistic things in bleak situations. “So we can probably save them!”

“Most of them, anyway,” Nick replied with a nod, watching Jerry Jumbeaux, Jr. shamble alongside the undead lemming herd. In Nick’s opinion, that was a guy who _deserved_ to spend the rest of his life as a brainless, shuffling thing. That was, after all, what that elephant thought foxes were, and Nick didn’t believe in karma as it was used colloquially, but he sure did believe in good old-fashioned revenge.

Judy didn’t seem to catch onto his meaning, which was probably for the best. She was _nice._ He wanted her to keep liking him and not worry that he was going to turn on her or something. He would never, but it was silly to trust a professional con artist, and anyway, the point was, Judy was already doing the magical equivalent of sniffing around for whoever — or whatever — had animated the dead.

“Gotcha,” she murmured, and reached for Nick’s paw. He gave it to her willingly and they ran, and the zombies turned to follow. “I feel like I know this, but I can’t place the feeling.”

“Finally, you show your cowardly faces,” boomed a voice that Nick vaguely recognized. He looked up and saw…

Oh, _deer._

In another, more stupid universe, Nick might have pointed dramatically at the floating cervid and shouted the name Malcolm Velvet, but he figured that would be a little too comic-book-y, so he didn’t indulge the urge. Instead, he squeezed Judy’s paw a little and hoped she would know what to do. He didn’t actually have a clue.

“How did you escape the womb,” Judy asked dumbly, so okay, she didn’t have a clue either. “It’s impossible. It’s _rotting._ I couldn’t even _find_ it after I sent you there.”

“Oh, please, little girl,” Velvet said disdainfully, tugging at the lapels of that hideous cheap trenchcoat. He had acquired a stiff, ill-fitting hat from somewhere as well, completing the picture of someone who needed serious help being less of a creep. “I have spent _years_ studying-”

With an amused look at Nick, Judy cut him off. “Did he just call me a little girl?”

“I think so,” Nick replied, closely mimicking her expression and adding a wink he hoped looked conspiratorial. It was hard to portray that with such a small gesture, but that was the drawback to nonverbal communication, and anyway, the dismissal seemed to be working.

Velvet stamped his hoof on what looked like a stormcloud and shouted, “Listen to me, fools!”

“Ugh, what a stereotype,” Nick complained.

“Right?” Judy pointed at the deer, pretending like this wasn’t the scariest thing either of them had been through. Well, Nick hadn’t been there during the Night Howler case, but he _assumed_ it hadn’t been as scary as facing a pissed off magical weirdo commanding an army of undead lemmings. Which, Nick realized, was only scary if you were _there._ On paper it would probably be hilarious to certain parties with...terrible senses of humor. With a shift in tone — something deeper, something laced with power — Judy added, **“You could stand to be a little more creative, Malcolm Velvet.”**

As though she had flipped a switch in Velvet’s brain, he advanced on them, floating closer. The zombies began to close in on them from behind. Nick’s instincts went haywire — not his fox ones, but his street ones, the ones that had kept him alive for the couple of years he’d lived under a bridge. “Carrots, we have to _move.”_

“On it,” she muttered, and teleported them onto the roof. Nick was starting to like the sentient question mark, which was always full of potentially-good advice, but as soon as they were safe, he was going to buy a piccolo from a pawn shop and smash it with a hammer. Possibly together with some lemons.

The building they had landed on was made for large mammals — not megafauna, but definitely larger than wolves — so they had a decent view of the carnage below, but there was no chance of the brainless lemming zombies climbing up to get them. Velvet didn’t seem to mind that, and Nick soon realized that it had been Velvet’s plan to use the zombies to lure Judy to him. Whatever damage the undead army managed to do was probably just a bonus for that jerk.

But Judy’s question was valid: how  _ had  _ he escaped the Womb of Nehilim? Both Judy’s sketchy memories of someone else’s life and the book they’d stolen from Velvet’s dorm room characterized the realm of the gods as necrotic. Rotting. Certainly uninhabitable. Malcolm Velvet wasn’t alive in the strictest sense, having lost his form to the banishment...so did that mean that his soul, or whatever he had left, was the only thing that needed to be transported? Had the deer known how to do this weird magic stuff before they had banished him? Had they actually alienated a potential  _ mine  _ of information?

Whoops.

Well, Velvet really was a tool anyway. Regardless of how much knowledge he might have had, Nick didn’t think he could bear to spend time with someone who wore a trenchcoat indoors and used the word “fools” unironically.

Nick got a good look at the floating weirdo and frowned when he realized Velvet had also picked up a sort of weapon from somewhere. It sometimes looked like a magic staff, but it also sort of looked like a sword, and Nick wasn’t sure which was worse. He was sure that Velvet had no idea how to use a sword like that, because nobody did anymore, but if it really was a magic staff that Nick couldn’t see very well for whatever reason, then it was probably the source of the zombies. Hmm. Could they get it away from Velvet somehow?

Judy made a fist and punched it toward Velvet. Weird shadow...things...came rushing out of her knuckles, and Nick wasn’t really sure what they were or what their purpose was, but he knew he didn’t want to touch them. Velvet seemed to share the sentiment; he used the weapon like a baseball bat to try to knock the wriggling mass of horrible magic stuff aside. Mostly, it worked, but a little bit of it split off and landed on his cheek, which immediately started eating away at itself.

Too bad it healed itself just as quickly.

“Don’t you understand, you incompetent idiots? I can’t be hurt!” Although the deer was obviously dangerous, Nick wanted to laugh, because this dialogue was seriously so bad. Was this dude reading from old rejected scripts? He sounded like an off-brand cartoon villain. “You can cast all the magic you like, but you’ll never truly touch me! I’m invincible!”

“He’s not lying,” Judy said solemnly, pulling him behind some brick structure just as Velvet threw a big glowing ball of  _ something  _ back at them. “He’s only soulstuff.”

“Can we just take a moment and appreciate how much like a turn-based RPG boss he is,” Nick asked, sort of rhetorically. Because he could hardly believe that this was  _ happening.  _ As much as he liked the idea of being with Judy once all of this got fixed, he kind of hoped that the entire last month had just been some kind of crazy fever dream, because that would mean demons and zombies and bad teleportation didn’t exist. “He seems pretty content to just float there until you send your own attack his way, and then he throws his own weird stuff  _ our  _ way.”

“And he’s controlling the zombies,” she reminded him tartly. “I imagine that takes up more mental space than taunting us. Also, he’s probably played a lot of video games. If  _ I  _ were trying to take down a demon, I’d just find a way to...neutralize her powers…” The expression on her face went from annoyed to downright devious, and Nick saw that optical illusion again, the one with shadows bending around her like a creepy dark halo. When he looked at them too hard, he felt like his brain was being invaded, so he looked at her twitching nose instead. He’d have looked into her eyes, but he wasn’t super invested in seeing more visions of death when they were actually  _ facing  _ death. “You saw that thing he’s holding, right?”

“Yeah,” he said with a nod. “What about it?”

“That’s the source of all of this. We need to get it, which means we need to lure him over here. Do you think you can act as a distraction? I think if you make a deal with me, I can probably put a protection spell on your fur or something. It’s just a guess, but we can’t hide here forever, and...I need to deal with the zombies.”

“I want to make a deal with you,” he told her, because for some reason it always gave her extra energy. The shadows darkened and her purple eyes gleamed. He took it as a good sign, which really said something about how effing ridiculous this whole thing was. “In exchange for physical and mental protection from Malcolm Velvet, or whatever part of Malcolm Velvet is left, I will do whatever you want, whenever you want, for a whole week after this is over.”

“Nick, you can’t,” said Judy, but she looked  _ hungry,  _ and Nick was quietly smug because he’d finally figured out the whole deal situation. The better the deal was for her, the stronger the compulsion was, and the stronger the outcome would be. 

He gave her a coy smile with a hint of fang. “It’s what I want. And...I trust you not to take advantage of me.”

She bit her lip and closed her eyes, but he saw the signs of a deal being accepted — a hint of sparkles on his tongue, the swooping sensation of incoming danger, the almost electric connection between them. This was so much bigger than pizza, though. It overwhelmed him, knocked him flat on his rear, coursed through him and made him feel completely full. His body hummed and sang and he felt invincible.

For all he knew, he  _ was  _ invincible. But he wasn’t willing to test it unless he absolutely had to, because he was a smart fox who valued his own existence.

“Okay, let’s go,” she said, pulling him up with ease. Was she stronger? She seemed stronger. “I’ll deal with the zombies; you deal with Velvet. Then we’ll switch.”

In a quick zap that smelled like daisies, she disappeared from the roof. Nick was  _ almost  _ surprised to realize that he did trust her; he knew that she was down on the ground, doing whatever she had planned to do with the zombies, and his role was to keep Velvet occupied enough to not notice what she was doing.

“Hey, Dipshit,” Nick called, waving his arms and jumping up and down to get Velvet’s attention. The deer looked over at him instead of tracking Judy’s movements, so that was good. He put on his best smirk and asked, “What do you call a three-humped camel?” Nick lifted his leg and slapped his thigh as though he were just the  _ funniest  _ guy in the world as he ended the joke. “Pregnant!”

“...What the fuck,” Velvet said flatly. 

“Come on over here! I’ve got more where that came from!”

“I know what you’re doing,” Velvet said in what Nick thought was a poor approximation of a growl. “It isn’t going to work.”

_ Clearly it is, if you’re still talking,  _ Nick thought, but he didn’t say it out loud. Instead, he stooped to pick up a jagged rock from beside the chimney, or whatever the brick thing was. He chucked it at Velvet, not expecting it to hit... _ but it did,  _ which really did get the douchedeer’s attention. In the blink of an eye, the cloud carrying Velvet was right above Nick, and a lightning bolt came down out of it. 

“Ugh, so unoriginal,” he complained loudly, jumping out of the way. He wasn’t proud of the way his legs splayed or his less than stellar landing, but at least he hadn’t been hurt. He trusted Judy, but he didn’t trust her powers. They still knew almost nothing about them. “Can’t you do something that you  _ don’t  _ find in one of your stupid video games? What are you, twelve?”

“Effectiveness is not predicated on originality,” Velvet protested.

Ugh. Nick would have to try harder. He looked over the ledge briefly and frowned; the zombies were still clearly undead, but they seemed to be...dancing now, rather than shuffling. Judy was standing on a table pointing at little sections of the horde, making each section dance. It looked like some kind of swing, which was a little bit adorable, but Nick didn’t have time to appreciate her creativity, because he was dealing with the  _ actual  _ threat.

He pointed dramatically at the cloud. “It’s not even effective! You called  _ us  _ fools, but you can’t catch me with your silly little magic spells!”

“We might as well test that. You have no idea who you’re dealing with,  _ Fox,”  _ Velvet said with the same kind of magical reverb that Judy sometimes used. It was a good thing Nick was used to it by now, or he’d be doubled over ready to vomit at the sound. This was a good sign. If Velvet stayed cartoonish, he’d probably soon start his evil monologue. That was still a thing, right? Well, either way, Nick had to dodge a flashing dart of something that would probably do something bad to his insides. “You can run-”

“Yes, but I can’t hide,” Nick shouted, hiding behind the bricks again. “Get some new material, ya stupid fawn!”

“Fawn!?  _ Fawn!?  _ **I am an ageless immortal being-”**

“-Who’s afraid to face a puny mortal fox.” Nick laughed, forcing as much disdain into his tone as possible. “You’re  _ pathetic.” _

Suddenly, Velvet was right in his face — he must have teleported as well, which,  _ why hadn’t he done that in the first place? —  _ and glimmering like an ugly gem in the sunlight. “I’ll show you pathetic,  _ worm.  _ When I’m through with you, you’ll wish you’d never been born. Behold! My army of nightmares!”

Velvet waved the staff and seemed to rip a hole in spacetime. Despite Judy’s protection, Nick felt mildly ill looking at the hole, which meant he’d probably be curled up in a little ball wishing for death if he were trying to do this alone. He put his wrist to his forehead dramatically. “Oh, no, my poor head! I’m going mad!”

“Not yet, you’re not.”

And—

Oh,  _ shit. _

Out of the hole poured an army of shadows, oozing, dark  _ things  _ that gave off a serious doom vibe. Nick backed away, or tried to, but Velvet caught him in some kind of force field with the staff-slash-sword thing, and yeah, he was sure he’d stepped into bizarro world, because  _ he was thinking about force fields outside of bad sci-fi.  _ He struggled against the bubble, but he couldn’t get through. He had two hypotheses: one, Judy’s spell was crap. Two, the bubble wasn’t hurting him, so Judy’s spell didn’t have anything to protect him  _ from  _ yet. He didn’t particularly want to test it to see which one was correct, though, so he really did curl up into a ball, hovering about three feet off the ground, and waited for the inevitable.

A clash of cymbals and that damnable lemon piccolo let him know that Judy had come to the rescue. She looked energized and positively  _ glowed  _ against her halo of shadows, and Nick had never been more attracted to her when she grabbed two of the nightmare creatures and slammed them so hard into the ground that they shattered into pieces. There were too many for her to do that one by one, and more were generating every moment, but it was a visually impressive entrance nonetheless.

She punched another shadow-thing in the face, and it shattered, too, but Nick saw Velvet throw down something giant, glowing, purplish-gray and nauseating. Nick shouted, “Look out!”

But it was too late. Judy took it head on. She fell to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, and Nick’s stomach dropped. Was that it? Was the world going to die, or worse, become a playground for  _ this  _ douchebag? That was actually worse than just dying, probably. Before Nick’s thoughts could spiral too much, Judy’s body pulsed and shook and oozed shadows, and then—

There was a burst of what Nick could only label  _ power.  _ It was all-consuming, and Judy was laughing darkly, a terrifying sound he would never have associated with the sweet, practical PI next door. When she snapped to her feet, she looked unbearably smug. “Thanks for the help, Sweetheart.”

She grabbed at nothing and pulled Velvet forward, crushing his antlers with the air itself. The deer shrieked, a horrible sound that Nick would probably have nightmares about, but he still had enough of his mind left to squeal, “I am  _ invincible!” _

“You tried to defeat the  _ Lord of Nightmares  _ with a  _ nightmare,  _ you silly goose,” she retorted with a laugh. This one was more like her, bright and joyous, which contrasted with the way she was mutilating Velvet’s body. At this point it looked more like it had been worked over by a deer-sized car crusher, and Nick imagined that Judy was going to have some serious guilt over this later, but it was necessary. 

She plucked the staff out of Velvet’s grasp and it solidified into a sword. He knew she had no idea how to use it, but she looked regal anyhow, throwing Velvet’s soulstuff-body into the void. With a grunt and a stomp of her foot that cracked the cement below them, Judy pulsed again, and suddenly the world was black-and-white. Nothing moved, not even the shadow army.

“I froze...everything,” she told him, holding out her paw. He took it and felt her power flow into him, and it was exactly as intimate as it sounded, and he tried not to show how intoxicated it made him feel. Was this how she felt all the time? Probably not.

He focused on the present, because he needed to and because he didn’t want to be the kind of mammal who consistently spaced out while his mind went 187 miles per hour. “What does that mean, you froze everything?”

“I mean that for the next...30 minutes or so, nothing will move. Time’s still running, but nothing else is.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” he said, raising an eyebrow.

“Neither does magic,” she retorted, “but here we are. Velvet’s last spell unlocked knowledge I didn’t know I had; Ialdabaoloth is one of many titles for the Lord of Nightmares. Me.  _ I’m  _ the Lord of Nightmares now. But I’m not all-powerful. I can only hold this for so long, and we need to follow him into the Womb of Nehilim and stop this chaos at its source.”

He felt weird about everything, but he decided it was all a dream, because that was easier to stomach than the bunny he loved being a nightmare demon. “Okay, fine, let’s do that, but do you feel like time’s wonky? I feel like time barely exists,” he said. “Has it really only been a few hours since we first saw the zombie army? I seriously don’t even know what day it is.”

“That’s because the universe is taunting us, I know it,” Judy grumbled, but she didn’t let go of his paw. “When I find whatever dumb supernatural force has made a mockery of real life, I’m going to punch it in the face twice — once for your sake, and once to get justice for the poor mammals who got hurt. Now, let’s go catch that nightmare.”

And it was a testament to how well Nick dealt with stupidity that he didn’t even make a bad joke about being worth more than all of Zootopia combined.

Well, okay. He didn’t make it because he was too busy wondering what  _ was  _ so worrying about taking the number 5 bus on September 3 in 2041 that random nightmares and animate punctuation would warn him against it.


	5. Sweet Dreams, Sorta

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The story ends, probably.

The Womb of Nehilim may have been described as “necrotic” in Velvet’s book, but Nick would have characterized it as “a giant scab.” It was pitch black, but also it wasn’t. There were grayscale patches along what he knew weren’t actual walls. They were pulsing, like a too-fast heartbeat, and little zings of what looked like sick electricity running up and down. He could see why it was called the Womb of Nehilim. Although it seemed to go on endlessly, it was also so small that he could hardly breathe. There was nothing but himself, Judy, and the frozen shadow beasts as far as the eye could see, but he felt the folds of the Womb cradling him on all sides.

It was highly unpleasant.

The eeriness intensified as they walked, because Nick knew that his legs were moving, but the scenery looked the same, and he didn’t  _ feel  _ like he was moving. He was halfway convinced that his mouth and throat wouldn’t work, but thankfully he could still talk, so he asked, “Is it supposed to feel like this?”

“I don’t... _ think  _ so,” Judy replied. He eyed her. She was frowning, but it wasn’t an angry frown or a sad one. More thoughtful than anything. Her shadow halo was still pulsing though, and her brightness — which he could only see if he looked at her; it didn’t exactly illuminate anything — hurt his eyes. She squeezed his paw, and it kind of hurt, but he tried not to show it. “I haven’t been here, and I don’t think we can really say that something else’s transferred memories are reliable, but it’s not supposed to be this dead. The sword is definitely from here, and I’m pretty sure Malcolm Velvet used it to cut his way out of the Womb, but there should be more relics. More  _ magic. _ This is supposed to be the realm of gods. The origin of dreams. But it’s rotten.”

“What does that  _ mean,  _ though?”

Her ear flicked toward something. He hoped it wasn’t a sound, because that would mean something else aside from them was alive in here. She didn’t stop walking, and she didn’t let go. Not a good sign, probably. Quietly, she said, “It’s supposed to look like the tunnels I make when I take us places. Those nightmares are supposed to be mine. They’re supposed to obey me, because I’m their master now. I am Ialdabaoloth, the ever-watching eye, the Lord of the Nightmare Realm. But they’re not obeying me.”

“You said the former one, who passed on this power, either wanted you to heal this place or just open it. What if he left instructions? What if this is what he wanted? The book made him seem like a monster.”

“He  _ was.” _

“So why won’t they obey you? What’s the difference between you and him? Not to say that  _ you’re  _ a monster,” Nick said hastily, “but the power is the same, right?”

“Nick…” She sighed and stopped. He watched her peripherally bring his paw up to her cheek and nuzzle it, which he liked, until he realized that he was feeling three tough lines — scar tissue, carefully hidden below her fur. “Do you feel that?”

“Yes,” he told her warily.

“A fox did that to me when I was little. He scratched me and pushed me into the dirt and told me I’d never be anything but a carrot-farming dumb bunny. Is that the kind of thing  _ you  _ would have done as a kit?”

“No, of course not. I was the one being bullied back then,” he admitted with a grimace. 

She took his paw again and began walking toward nothing, so he followed as she delivered her point. “You’re the same species. You both had the same claws as a kit. But you wouldn’t have done that, and you didn’t have to go through an anger management program, and you didn’t grow up to be a baker. He’s kind now, but it’s deliberate. He doesn’t want to be the kind of mammal he could be — the kind of mammal he sometimes is on the inside. You’re sweet only when you forget to pretend you’re not. You’re built the same, but you’re not the same mammal. The former Lord of Nightmares wasn’t me. I doubt he even started out mortal, if demons or gods or what have you  _ start out  _ as anything at all. Maybe he inherited these powers; maybe he always had them. I don’t know what he was, but I know he was a monster. I don’t have that in me, and I wouldn’t want to.”

“Do you think it’s because you’re a good mammal that you can’t command them?”

“Either that, or I’m just not powerful enough. We’ve gotten this far on sheer luck, Nick. I was careless, and I thought that halfhearted answers to amateur summons and deals with you were all I’d need to worry about. I didn’t experiment. I don’t like the way these powers make me feel, and I don’t like that nobody can look me in the eye anymore, and so I tried to ignore it. And now we’re just winging it, hoping we don’t die, because I was irresponsible. I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” he replied, because that was what she was looking for. He could have told her it wasn’t her fault — neither of them could have predicted that they’d have to stop a zombie horde and an army of creepy shadow beasts — and he could have told her to go screw herself, but he didn’t want that. 

Her ear twitched again. “Can you hear that heartbeat?”

“...Maybe?” There was _something._ It wasn’t so much a sound as it was an experience, a pulse in his whole body, the taste of electricity and a tiny _lub-dub_ in his ears. As they walked through the unsettling void, the experience got more intense; he could feel the fabric of the realm squeezing in on him, and he felt like he should be suffocating, but he wasn’t. He squeezed her paw much harder than he meant to, torn between trying to reassure her and running away from the heartbeat. Every self-preservation instinct was on full-blast, telling him to get away from the threat...but Judy’s side was the safest place to be, even if she was leading him toward whatever was beating. “What is it, Carrots?”

“I have no idea, but I don’t like it.”

Suddenly, but also not suddenly, a giant pulsing... _ thing  _ appeared, but also it had always been there. Nick couldn’t remember it not being there, but he did remember thinking he didn’t see it, and this was all very strange. Dream-like. The spooky timeless quality of the place made Nick think of his most peaceful nightmares, the ones that made him wake up terrified because  _ nothing was happening.  _ Judy seemed entranced by the thing; she tried to shake him off and get closer to it, but Nick refused to let go.

And then everything came to life.

The shadow beasts, which had been still and silent, sprang into action, big ugly slashes in place of smiles and sinister feelings back in full force. Judy swung her sword wildly, obviously unable to use it, but at least she had a pointy object. He just had his teeth, and he didn’t want to find out what might happen to him if he took a bite out of a shadow.

“Oh, for  _ plot’s sake, _ it hasn’t even been 30 minutes,” he protested, but it was lost in the horrible sound of roaring beasts and the omnipresent  _ lub-dub, lub-dub.  _ It was almost like it was trying to pull his mind apart, but Judy’s spell was apparently still working, so it only gave him a mild headache.

A  _ thing  _ took a swipe at him and he jumped back just in time to see another  _ thing  _ dig its claws into Judy’s left eye socket, ripping out the eyeball (Nick gagged violently). Its teeth dug into her ear and ripped off a piece of that, too. He had to  _ do something!  _ He had to help! He reached out to pull her to him, hoping the protection would extend to her as well, but a shadow beast rammed into him and he fell straight into the physical heartbeat thing. Judy shouted his name in anguish, then let out a shriek that was so loud it  _ hurt,  _ and he saw her begin to... _ change. _ The entire Womb lit up, went technicolor—

* * *

“Dammit,” he swore, kicking the bricks and then hopping up and down because kicking bricks  _ hurt.  _ He wasn’t sure how he had gotten back to the real world from the crazy nightmare realm, but he couldn’t get back. The last thing he had seen, before he’d blacked out, had been Judy’s small form growing, contorting, changing shape. She had turned into a great big red-rimmed eyeball, tentacles sprouting from the vessels...it should have been gross, but thinking back on it, he only admired her more.

She had changed because of him. 

He sat down on the edge of the building, nursing his aching foot and watching the zombies below. They were still dancing. Somehow, some of them had gotten hold of instruments, and they were playing an up-tempo song that he couldn’t hear well. It was bizarre to see the living and the dead perform rather spectacular big band swing, partly because it was  _ swing dancing  _ but mostly because nobody danced like that anymore. It was surely Judy’s spell that made it possible. Did that mean that she was still alive? He hoped so.

Not being able to see her, not knowing what was  _ going on,  _ was going to drive him crazy. She was important to him, and he wasn’t there to have her back. Would she even like him anymore if she ended up staying in her big tentacle-y eyeball form?

The truth was, Nick had no idea how he’d managed to win her attention in the first place. He was a whole eight years younger, which obviously wasn’t a  _ huge  _ obstacle, but she had met such important mammals as Mayor Lionheart during that case with Kat Castleberry, Ethan Longfoot when he’d needed a PI to locate his missing sister, and Rachel Furris, a former  _ Playcub  _ model and hard-hitting reporter for the  _ Zootopia Herald.  _ Nick was just Nick, a knockoff of his mother who had never had the heart to be a ruthless prick. He lived next door to Judy in a shitty apartment building, but other than that, what did she even like about him? She was an idealist with a weird sense of humor. And he…

Well. Maybe he was, too. After all, even though the portal had closed, there was a small part of him that was planning their future together. He’d probably be carving their initials in a tree right now if there were a tree around, and if he were secretly nine. 

He closed his eyes, blocking out the music and the dancing undead, and began to pray.

“Judy,” he said aloud, because praying was really hard. He’d never actually done it before. “Carrots. Ialdabaoloth. Whoever you are right now. Don’t die, okay? I don’t think I can tell you this to your face — or eye, maybe — at least, not yet. But I’m really kind of in love with you, and I don’t even care if you have weird tentacles and we have to live in outer space or whatever, I just want you around. So you swing that sword until all those shadow things either die or listen to you, and then come back to me. I don’t know how to end a prayer. I’m done now. See you later.”

Hopefully, nobody had heard that, because he had a feeling that was the lamest prayer anyone had ever said, in the history of praying. Of course, most mammals prayed to someone who didn’t even exist, so maybe he was the only one who’d done it right. Yeah. Yeah, that was it. His prayer was actually the  _ best,  _ and he wouldn’t be ashamed of it, because he was way too cool for shame. Also he was the only one, thus far, with a direct line to the deity he was praying to.

“PS, you’d better be listening,” he said to no one. To sweeten the pot, he added, “If you come back safely, I’ll do whatever you want for  _ two  _ weeks.”

Nothing. He kicked his feet. Sighed. Waiting around for the action to finish was  _ boring.  _ How come he couldn’t at least have some kind of viewing bubble? Why did he have to be stuck in one head, with one perspective, unable to see what else was going on? That was a terrible oversight, honestly, although he wasn’t sure how any other method of experiencing consciousness could work.

“Thanks for guiding me home, Nick,” said the most wonderful voice from behind him. He jumped up and turned. The air was ripping open again, shining with eerie light that was also dark, because why would anything make sense? “I wasn’t supposed to  _ heal  _ the Womb of Nehilim; I’m supposed to  _ seal  _ it. Just keep talking.”

“I read about this place that put bombs in its mountains,” he said, pitching his voice to carry the way he did when he invited customers. He even used his paws in the same way, hoping the motion might help. “They have a whole city underneath the city, with underground tunnels and stuff. I can’t remember if it was fiction or not. It might have been. Did you know that there’s a town out west made almost entirely of foxes? It’s called Skyeview. Supposedly, they’re descended from captives who escaped from pirates and raiders, but I’m not sure how true that is. I  _ do  _ know that’s where the writers for the  _ Agent Savage  _ comics got Skye Frost’s name, because why be creative when you can just not think very hard?”

He thought he heard Judy laugh, but he was too interested in how the shadow beasts and the undead lemmings were zooming into the pulsing, shining portal in front of him. He smiled through his fear of getting sucked in alongside the horde of nightmare creatures and continued, “I’m going to teach you how to pick pockets when you get back. Assuming you still have paws. It’s an important life skill you need to know if you want to be a halfway decent hustler, or if you want to impress my mother. I’d say you can practice on me, but we both know if you stick your paws down my pants we’ll get distracted.”

That was definitely a laugh. He brightened further, as did the portal. “Anyway, I’m proposing another deal: if you get out and seal that realm properly, I’ll practice and practice and keep practicing until I’ve given you the best damn kiss you’ve ever had.”

He took a shaky step back as the portal pulsed so brightly he had to close his eyes. A horrible tearing, screeching noise sounded all around him, and although he knew it might hurt, he opened his eyes—

When Judy walked out of the squirming mass of shadows and nightmares, limping, missing one eye, covered in grime and blood, Nick was sure he could hear the not-undead-anymore orchestra in the square below begin the last six-and-a-half-ish minutes of Tchaikovsky’s  _ Romeo and Juliet.  _ Later, he would take an embarrassed look at just how many garbage romcoms he’d watched, but at the moment, she was just like a warrior queen, sword in paw and what looked like a shadow army trailing behind her, and he could hardly breathe at how beautiful it was.

“Oh, Judy,” he said, and heedless off the sharpness and length of her sword, he rushed her, throwing his arms around her when he reached her. She dropped her sword, allowing him to twirl her around and around in celebration of their — well,  _ her,  _ but he was an excellent cheerleader, so it counted — victory. 

When he set her down again to look at her up close, she put a paw to the edge of her ruined eye socket. She grimaced. “I’ll have to learn a cheap illusion. Or buy an eyepatch. I’m ugly now.”

“You are  _ not  _ ugly,” he said firmly, although he did agree internally that an eyepatch would probably make her look cool, and also be less intimidating to clients. He rubbed his paw between her ears just as she liked. “You, Mistress Fluff of Carrotland, are a dream come true.”

“Nick,” she groaned. “I’m the  _ Lord of Nightmares.  _ You have to take me  _ seriously.” _

“I  _ seriously  _ love you,” he shot back, grinning. She was still leaning into his petting. Demon lord she may have been, but she was also his sweet, slightly goofy neighbor who liked horror comedies and solving mysteries and Nick. “I love you like stars love bees: incomprehensibly, and it’s probably against someone’s religion.”

“Yeah,” she told him through a laugh. She hugged him tightly, and he didn’t even mind that her unnatural strength made it a little hard to breathe. “I love you too, Nick.”

And that was that. The battle was won, the Womb was sealed, and Nick and Judy were wonderfully, passionately in love. It would be easy to say that they lived happily ever after, but that wouldn’t be true; no one, after all, lives forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obviously I gave zero fucks. I'm actually happy with this. My other Halloween story is legitimately horrific, and I might not post it. Still deciding. Either way, happy belated Halloween.


End file.
